by rufus
I am potentially getting involved with a company called thinkgrid. I won’t go into too much detail, to protect client confidentiality, but their business will depend on complete automation. In the case of thinkgrid there is an additional driver behind the automation project. The long term aim is to make the engineering interface sufficiently robust and intuitive that it can be made available to selected clients.
At the moment there are disparate automated pieces interspersed with manual tasks. The first thing required is a data discovery piece where we need to look at the common manual tasks are. These will need to be automated in a way that allows the creation of an integrated interface. Once that is designed we will look at what other functionality is required. Finally we will consider how it should all fit together. This sounds like a big monolithic project but it isn’t. Automation is perfect for a couple of the Agile principles:
• Continuous improvement. Each task automated is perfect for instant use within the business providing immediate value.
• Bite sized atomic tasks. The differences in the manual tasks can be accommodated with each sprint.
More on this project as it progresses…
Posted in efficiency, Principles, Process |
by rufus
If your data is precise you can trend it over time because the error bars are small. If your data is accurate you get better snapshots. Knowing that your data isn’t accurate is fine, but having to work to get it into a position to be precise before you use it to work out if the changes you’ve made have worked is probably one of the hardest things. That is something that has always annoyed me about WA tools that limit table lengths and/or go into a sampling mode in the long tail.
More on this another time, it has just been annoying me…
Rufus Evison
by rufus
Before launching a new product it is necessary to research your potential market. Who will buy it, how will they use it how much will they pay, how much will they pay and why will they buy? You need to learn all of this and more. This is undisputed. Why, then, does noone do the market research before starting a company? They have an idea and feel that is enough.
Just because an idea for a product or service is good and useful does not mean anyone will use it. Just because and idea is trivial does not mean it will not make a fortune. If something is convenient and cheap people may use it rather than doing it better themselves. Is grated cheese worth buying when grating is so easy?
I will write further articles on some objective ways of evaluating your busines idea, but for now I will just re-state the necessity. I have seen so many businesses fail because their market did not want them, or simply did not exist. Please don’t create another simply because you have a great idea and everyone says it will work as a business.
Rufus Evison
by rufus
It doesn’t really matter what it is, there is probably benefit in measuring it. The story of dunnhumby is the story of a couple who made a fortune out of finding insights in a measurement of what was being sold by Tesco. An apple picker could possibly learn a lot simply by measuring what she picked from each tree, where the tree was, what the nearby soil looked like and so forth. Whether this would say that the shelter supplied by hedgerows improved yield or that white soil drained better and gave more apples in cold summers or what she would learn I do not know. I do know that Gregor Mendel learned the science that later led to genetically modified corn starch by measuring what he was doing while he grew his peas.
Whatever you do there will be unexpected benefits in measuring it. Whilst it is not certain that these benefits will out-weigh the costs I have never seen a case where they didn’t. The element of genius is in spotting the benefits before you measure and so measuring the right things.
Posted in Uncategorized |
by rufus
Meetings come in all shapes and sizes. There are sales meetings where different participants have different objectives. There are training sessions where the objectives of a trainer may be different to those of a trainee. Here I am only going to look at meetings where all participants have the same objective. I know that this is actually a pretty unusual and unrealistic scenario but it is the simple base from which to build. Other articles will cover differences from this and how to look at them. As always, the insight will be in the differences.
Meetings are to set actions, to pass information and to build the team, so how do we make them effective? First we need to understand what the meeting is for. If the meeting does not have a purpose then why is it taking place? The purpose could be as simple as “team building by having fun together” but a meeting needs to have a purpose.
Once the purpose has been defined you can start to look at what outputs the meeting might produce. These can be fairly broad ranging:
• A list of data to be gathered for the next meeting
• Decisions made
• Actions to progress
• A fruit cake to be made by the team
• A happy smiling team
• Anything else…
It is worth deciding what the outputs are and circulating a list before the meeting so that everyone knows what they are working towards.
Once you know what you are trying to achieve, and to what purpose, you can decide who needs to attend. This list could be the people who will actually do the work, for instance. I will be writing a separate piece on choosing who to invite to a meeting.
After you know who is going to be there you can start to structure how you expect the meeting to proceed. As you do this you may well find you need to change the invitees so that things will move according to plan.
After you have an outline structure you can start to estimate how long the meeting will take. This is the point where you discover that getting everyone required is a scheduling nightmare. In a small company you can cut through this and just drag people in. In a large company you may need to see if you can separate out some tasks that can be accomplished by a subset of attendees.
Finally you have a time everyone can make and are ready to invite people. The invite itself deserves a separate article.
Rufus Evison
by rufus
Web analytics is, as you might expect, about gathering data and analysing it. It, therefore, follows a predictable journey dictated by the place of the website within the business..
Justification=>usability=>analysis=>segmentation=>personalisation=>individualisation (or true personalisation)
When a business first gets a website it is necessary to justify its existence. At this stage the credibility of the figures matters far more than the utility. It is a game of large numbers.
Next comes the search for the best possible web site. This, if people do it, provides the most obvious Roi of all the steps along this journey. As there is no such thing as the best possible site this leads naturally on to analysis.
Analysis can go either of two ways:
• Analysis of the site
• Analysis of the users (+)
Either can produce benefits but it is probably best to do both.
Segmentation can be thought of as further analysis but in fact, if done right it is analysis with a purpose. If it is a loyalty segmentation the purpose might be to get people to migrate between segments. If it is a demographic segmentation the purpose might be to inform media buying. The key point is that analysis is about understanding (preferably as actionable insight) while segmentation is about creating a pre-defined change.
Personalisation is about creating the best possible website for each segment of your customers and then delivering it to them. In essence it combines your segmentation work with an understanding of the available information when the decision of what to serve is made.
Individualisation is what personalisation aspires to be. It is the art of providing the best possible web experience for them to each user.
Rufus Evison
(+)users not customers. While it would be nice if everyone wh visited the site either was or became a customer real life is not like that.
by rufus
BA – branding matters
I have just been privileged to have my web site assessed by a professional copy writer from the Condé Nast stable (*).
She highlighted the difference in style between www.evison.com and xxx. Theirs is much colder and more impersonal and mine is much more warm and chatty. Or to put it another way theirs is a much more business-like site and mine is much more experience and knowledge based.
This makes sense in many ways:
• Smoke and mirrors
My business is seeing past the smoke and mirrors theirs is in using them to sell a genuinely valuable product to a customer who would otherwise mistakenly believe they could do it themselves. The business-like manner helps to legitimize this.
• Match to me
One of the key factors behind my success has been my authenticity. If my website were not equally a match with me then it would create a cognitive dissonance. This would make it much harder for me to write it as well as making it less useful/readable.
• Purpose of site
The purpose of my site is straightforward. It is to help startups become the sort of startups I want to be involved in. It needs to follow my principles of networking so that if it brings me business it brings the right sort of business.
I feel that this sort of alignment is important. As I do try to practice what I preach my response is to agree with her that thjis type of site works for me and to not outsource production quite yet…
Rufus Evison
(*) Contact me to get in touch with her.
by rufus
What is the difference between Marketing and Sales? You have a one page advert in a relevant trade magazine, is it marketing or sales? That depends on a couple of things. First on whether the money comes out of the brand budget or the trade budget. Second on whether the intention is to create immediate sales or to put your brand or product into the minds of customers.
Really these are two different views of the same thing.
Sometimes the costs are referred to as below the line and above the line. This is because of the old accountancy rules around assignable costs of sale and costs of running a business. For tax purposes they were separate and there was a literal line ruled between them on the balance sheet.
Rufus Evison
by rufus
People buy things because they are cheap. People buy things because they are convenient. People buy things for the prestige they bring.
People also buy things because the sales person will sleep with them, because ownership allows them to stay in the country and a whole host of other reasons unrelated to the product itself. These external factors may be useful in advertising or marketing but stick to the first three when creating your business model.
Rufus evison
by rufus
I had an appointment this morning that was cancelled/rescheduled. I was meeting someone I knew at school who now works at Kitcatt Nohr.
The cancellation was for good reason but the meeting is more speculative. It set me to thinking, why am I going to see Marc? Really I have no particular reason at all, but the principles of networking suggest it is a good idea.
He is someone I respect and he seems to have done reasonably well in a related area to me. Equally I am someone I respect and have done well in a related area to him. It seems reasonable that we should meet.
Once we meet I will see what I can do to make his life better, his business more successful or just to help in general.
The idea is that I will show him I am someone that is useful and that I make any interaction worth while. I will let him know the types of things I do and so forth. At the same time I will satisfy myself that he is a competent person, understand the types of things he does and make sure he is the type of person I would like to work with.
Then if either of us see a fit it will probably happen. He will know I am a safe pair of hands and i will know anything he offers is worth doing. The converse is tryue. If I see something for him he will know my judgement is worth following and take it seriously.
So while it is easy to say “what goes around comes around” and other meaningful platitudes networking by trying to be useful genuinely sets the groundwork for a real business relationship.
Rufus Evison